Christopher Rufo Explains the Real, Dark Intentions Behind Drag Queen Story Hour

We have all heard of Drag Queen Story Hour being featured in public and school libraries across the nation and wondered why any sensible librarian, regardless of their politics, would ever say to her or himself, “Yes, men dressed as cartoonish women dancing provocatively is exactly what we should provide for the young patrons of our library!”

That question is even more disturbing when one digs into the true intentions of those who founded and are pushing Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) around our nation and the world. That is exactly what Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, did in a very important exposé in the most recent issue of City Journal. (He also published an abridged version at Foxnews.com)

Rufo explains, “The drag queen might appear as a comic figure, but he carries an utterly serious message: the deconstruction of sex, the reconstruction of child sexuality, and the subversion of middle-class family life.”

He adds, “By excavating the foundations of this ideology and sifting through the literature of its activists, parents and citizens can finally understand the new sexual politics and formulate a strategy for resisting it.”

And resist it we must!

DQSH is certainly not harmless fun, nor is it “family friendly” as its promoters happily claim. Rufo uncovers a much darker, sinister story, “The ideology that drives this movement was born in the sex dungeons of San Francisco and incubated in the academy.”

What is now manifesting itself in our children’s innocence started in the academic and wholly subversive, unscientific bowels of “queer theory.” It celebrates any and everything that challenges and overturns the fundamental human reality of what male and female are and how they both come together to create the family and the next generation of humanity through marriage and the family.

Rufo meticulously details the poisonous contribution of these academic theorists, but his article becomes most interesting to Daily Citizen readers when he explores the very recent writings of the founders and promoters of Drag Queen Story Hour itself, as drag went from an aberrant undercurrent in society to “good old-fashioned, glamorous American fun” with the likes of prime-time cable entertainers like RuPaul. Rufo explains, “Television producers packaged this new form of drag as reality programming, softening the image of the drag queen and assimilating the genre into mass media and consumer culture.”

This created an opportunity in which a “genderqueer” college professor and drag queen named Harris Kornstein, aka, Lil Miss Hot Mess, began to exploit. Rufo explains that Kornstein was one of the first drag performers “who hosted some of the original readings in public libraries and wrote the children’s book, The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish.”

Kornstein also sits on the board of the non-profit organization Drag Queen Story Hour, which was founded in 2015 to conduct “family-friendly” drag performances for children in libraries and schools. DQSH has expanded to 40 local chapters across the United States, performing hundreds of shows in front of innocent, impressionable children with the warm encouragement of librarians and other adults.

Kornstein published the central manifesto for the DQSH movement in 2020, entitled “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood.” Apparently, the academic publishers of this essay, Curriculum Inquiry, were worried the queer imagination of our children was not “playful” enough so they happily published this grooming craziness. In fact, Kornstein authored this supposedly serious academic article under his drag name, Lil Miss Hot Mess.

Rufo explains,

To disrupt this dynamic, the authors propose a new teaching method, “drag pedagogy,” as a way of stimulating the “queer imagination,” teaching kids “how to live queerly,” and “bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children.”

There is not a clearer definition of grooming– deliberately sexualizing and confusing children so they are open to aberrant sexual behavior – than this. Rufo adds,

As Kornstein and Keenan explain, this is an intellectual and political project that requires drag queens and activists to work toward undermining traditional notions of sexuality, replacing the biological family with the ideological family, and arousing transgressive sexual desires in young children. “Building in part from queer theory and trans studies, queer and trans pedagogies seek to actively destabilize the normative function of schooling through transformative education,” they write. “This is a fundamentally different orientation than movements towards the inclusion or assimilation of LGBT people into the existing structures of school and society.”

Yes, DQHS is after your kids.

Drag Queen Story Hour events are ambitiously billed as “family-friendly” in order to sell them to unsuspecting soccer moms and librarians. Rufo details how Kornstein and his co-author explain that this is mere subterfuge. Kornstein says, “It may be that DQSH is ‘family friendly,’ in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship.”

These authors continue, “Here, DQSH is ‘family friendly’ in the sense of ‘family’ as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.”

Rufo concludes, “That is, the goal is not to reinforce the biological family but to facilitate the child’s transition into the ideological family.”

Both Rufo’s City Journal article and Kornstein’s “Drag Pedagogy” essay carefully document that DQSH is not harmless fun being conducted by your local public library or elementary school. It is a full-on catechesis in the new religion of gender ideology and aggressive deconstruction of the family and beauty of male and female. It is consciously working to recruit your child. As unfashionable as it is to say such a thing, the facts point to exactly that.

Rufo ends this revealing article with the smart and hopeful observation that such deception will ultimately reveal itself, as great evil always does.

When parents, voters, and political leaders understand the true nature of Drag Queen Story Hour and the ideology that drives it, they will work quickly to restore the limits that have been temporarily – and recklessly – abandoned.

Thankfully, members of Congress have introduced an important bill to stop our tax dollars from going to these truly dangerous events in schools and community libraries. This is a very good first step.

The second is for concerned parents and grandparents to inform themselves of just how insidious events like DQSH are and make sure they never get a foothold in any child’s life.

Such evils can only exist with our silence or ignorance. Rufo has educated us. Our voices must now be heard.

Photo from Getty.